Description

You have been turned into a ball of air with a slow leak by an evil wizard. You must find the Spellbook and the ingredients for the spell. Without these, you will never turn back into a human again.

These items have to be collected in the maze which consists of 150 isometric rooms. These can be explored freely but sometimes you need to have special objects to proceed, e.g. a candle in dark rooms. The dangers consist mostly of sharp objects which can cause your ball to burst. Additionally you are on a timer because your balloon loses air constantly. But it can be refilled by using pumps which can be found in the maze - but you have to leave them in time or you explode because of overpressure.

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Trivia

Apple IIgs port

According to its author, Jason Harper, Airball for the Apple IIgs only sold 144 copies, a small amount even on the IIgs platform. It was Microdeal's first and last IIgs game.

Construction set

The Atari ST version included a utility called Airball Construction Set which allowed players to create their own Airball worlds.

NES port

A rough prototype was completed by Tengen for the Nintendo Entertainment System and was slated for a release in 1991, but the project was scrapped due to the public's declining interest in the console. It got eventually finished in 2007 by RetroZone and reproduction cartridges are available for purchase.

PC port

Airball was one of the few games where support for multiple graphics modes made the game either easier (or harder) to play. In Airball's case, the CGA support managed to achieve both advantages and disadvantages over the EGA and VGA support. In some places, the lack of color made game objects extremely hard to see against complex backgrounds. But in other cases, CGA's lack of a color palette eliminated the need for objects that produce light, like candles or lanterns. (Since the EGA and VGA palette was used to "dim" the environment when exploring the deeper levels of the castle, CGA users could see everything brightly because there was no palette to dim.)